Street Art

If artists are given walls to paint they can turn dreary areas into art and develop skills which can transfer into mainstream employment, says The Learning Connexion (TLC) managing director Jonathan Milne.

* * *

When TLC was based at Erskine a group of local kids asked (very politely) if they could use the walls on an old court area to do graffiti. We said that was okay and away they went. In the years before we shifted to Taita we enjoyed the ever-changing designs. Curiously the buildings at Erskine were never ‘tagged’ until after we left.

Recently I took my camera for a walk around one of the most heavily graffitied areas in Wellington and found plenty of work that would qualify as ‘art’ alongside plenty more that would qualify as tagging, which is approximately the same as when a dog pees on a lamp post to make its mark. It is mostly this second type of marking which defaces whole communities and is the centre of an endless battle with local authorities. It is vandalism.

The arty graffiti is a different story and city councils are creatively adapting. In some cases graffiti is being treated as a legitimate art form and drab walls are being transformed with the benefit of public funding. You might think that public sponsorship would take some of the fun out of graffiti and perhaps it does. On the other hand it reveals that many graffiti artists just want the opportunity to make art.

During 2010, TLC has been running ‘street art’ classes and the students have been marvelously hard-working and dedicated. They’re working as part of an important and complex sub-culture. As a school we decided to say "yes" to graffiti for several reasons. It could be art; it opened the way to a large amount of valuable learning (you can do your own computer versions of graffiti and it’s a door to the graphic arts); it provides a building block for kids who are very frustrated by the conformity of the regular school programme; it’s a way of communicating between generations and sometimes it turns out to be a powerful means of airing ideas that don’t get much coverage in mainstream media.

One of the heroes of street artists is Banksy, the anonymous man who has led a graffiti revolution, partly by the extraordinary power of his work. The book ‘Wall and Piece’ is a collection of Banksy art, mostly graffiti, and it is selling well in New Zealand. Apparently one of Banksy’s works was on a building that was to be demolished, but the owner carefully saved part of the wall and sold it for ?200,000.

One of the main needs of street artists (as opposed to taggers) is to have their work seen as art. The paradox of having classes on graffiti is that it will help make graffiti more manageable. If the artists are given walls to paint they can turn dreary areas into art. And of course they develop some sophisticated skills which transfer into mainstream employment.

Further information

Jonathan Milne is Managing Director and founder of The Learning Connexion School of Art and Creativity and will be presenting some of his 'gently subversive' thoughts on creativity in a series of articles. Milne is equally interested in science and art and has always been captivated by the notion that life has meaning and heaven is within. He has led courses on art, business and creativity in businesses and universities.

In 2008 his book, 'GO! The Art of Change' , was published.   He is presently working on 'Art, Meaning and Myth'.  He says 'Creativity isn't a slogan - it's about real engagement with who we are.  I love to see people getting a bigger sense of what they can be, both individually and collectively.  It's like suddenly breaking out of a great spiderweb of entrenched expectations.'